[Review] Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

[hex65000]

-Why did I buy this?

Okay, This game is a bit dated, but I grabbed it on Amazon for less than $20 new and it just seemed to be an over the top tongue-in-cheek poke at the video game industry. The premise was not-serious enough that I broke this out immediately on receiving it in the mail. That and I was hopped up on coffee that night.

 

-Capsule:

A fairly straightforward "over the shoulder" 3rd person shooter. A nice variety of wacky enemies. A couple of boss fights that are near perpetual cheap-shots. The gameplay is overall solid, but doesn't require a lot of heavy thought and the levels are linear. What makes this game worth looking at and playing is the humour and writing that makes fun of itself and the game industry in general. Recommended buy at the $15-$20 mark.

 

-What stood out during the game?

The voice acting, the amusing parodies and references to existing video game characters, the entertaining writing, the handful of just annoying legs of a chapter (mostly boss fights) that seemed to need near-dumb luck to pull off. Good action music score with lots of big hair metal guitar.

 

-More thoughts:

In the world of Matt Hazard, Matt is a washed up action video game character for the company 'Marathon' and after proving that he has no marketing and business sense, runs the company into the ground. Until 'Marathon' is resurrected by a guy with a lot of cash and the company is renamed 'Marathon Megasoft' Matt is tapped to stage his comeback in the next generation game platforms. But wait, he was scripted to die at the end of level 1. Forever. Why? Stay tuned true believers...

 

That's the basis of the story right there. A bit wonky if you consider that a video game character managed to make business decisions for a "Real-life" company. This over analysis isn't good for you in Eat Lead... just smile, nod, and let the story keep rolling.

 

This is honestly the strength of this game. The story. Not that it is epic. It's not. It's that quirky movie story like Ferris Beuller's Day Off where the fourth wall gets broken to possibly make fun of what you're already thinking. "Oh. Great. A tutorial. It's not like I need one of these to tell me how to move around and shoot a gun after 25 years.", grumbles a slightly annoyed Matt at the beginning of the game when you say "Sure, do the tutorial". There are references abound in the form of cliché enemies, and some occasionally amusing parodies of other popular figures. For example, there's "Master Chef" Who is a dumpy-looking short-order style cook who waddles around in some kind of futuristic space armor. Captain Carpenter is a burly blue overalls wearing kind of guy who knows how to fight nasty turtles, and poisonous mushrooms, but can't handle a gun to save his life. Altos Tratus which looks and behaves like your typical final fantasy character. One of my favorite moments was with this character before the fight. "..." (Matt Paraphrased) "An elipsis? What the hell is it with you Japanese characters and ellipses? What does that even mean?"

 

I've talked about the writing and how it's amusing for what it is, but not the gameplay. In short it's good, but nothing too original is happening here. The game uses a find cover and shoot system. At first I found this annoying, because when I typically play FPS type games I just ram may way through enemies and once the body count is high enough go exploring the areas I've cleared out. This is not something I can do in Eat Lead. The cycle is pretty much the following. A checkpoint save will occur. You will get to an area or room and you will wind up trapped in that room until everything but you is dead, or deader if you want to be picky about the zombies. To survive, you have to hide behind cover and pick at enemies this way. Sometimes just standing behind cover works pretty well too. Regardless, you just can't stand there and shoot for long. You also have the option to run up and melee attack most enemies (there are exceptions and some can fight back rather well). In some cases it was more effective for me to run up on opponents and slap them around versus shooting them and wasting precious ammunition.

 

There was some thought put into what your options are regarding the use of cover and for this I am grateful. It's not Time Crisis for crying out loud. The cover aspect covers a majority of the notably linear format of the game. There are exceptions such as selected fight scenes where you have to hit certain button/stick combinations to put the beat down on an special enemy. There is also a level where you have sniper stations where you have to pick off enemies with said rifle before one of your friends is killed. Neither of these events are plentiful enough to be annoying. There is also a few sections where you have to avoid the lasers of your in-game nemesis 'Sting Sniperscope' These rounds force you to run and find cover, but is thankfully only in a handful of places -- because these are 1-shot kill events, and it can be frustrating at times.

 

The weapons are pretty varied, but not particularly amazing. If you have ever played "Armed And Dangerous" with its vast collection of wacky weapons, this would have made things a bit more amusing. Sure you get classic 6-shooters, laser pistols, sniper rifles and the like, but none of the guns are stand out awesome. Not a crucial complaint, but worth noting. Also of note is that you can only carry 2 weapons at a time. Since you can't backtrack, sometimes conserving ammo is crucial -- and a little annoying when your'e sloppy in a fight.

 

Enemies are fairly diverse and some are imaginative. The 2D sprite enemies are the standout among them. They run around in the 4-5 frame sequence, shoot at you with their 2D rifle then turn sideways so you can't hurt them. Honestly, the only enemy that made me super frustrated was the boss with tentacles. In the beginning you have to run around and avoid the six tentacles that lash at the ship, and each one has a pretty good reach. Now you have to run around and wait for one to get stuck in the boat so you can shoot it. After the first tentacle is taken out you now have enemies spawn periodically too. This lead to me dying... a lot. fortunately, the checkpoint system is pretty forgiving overall because if I had to fight that first round again after clearing it and then getting killed at stage 2 with the same boss I would have been super unhappy. I died at least 20 times fighting those tentacles. That was annoying.

 

I can't think of anything meaningful in terms of graphics and sound. They met the requirements in that characters and the environment looked reasonable for the context of the world being presented, and other than the action music having occasional big hair metal guitar riffs in it set the tone adequately as well. I'm not saying the A/V experience was awesome nor was it bad. It did the job and I wasn't seriously annoyed by odd glitches or music that made me need to kill some aspect of the audio experience.

 

The Achievements on this game (for Xbox360) are in some cases outright gifts. There are a couple of tricky ones too, but you can get a pretty good score just playing through in a competent manner. Some people may be annoyed by the freebie achievements, but at the same time, it's not that big of a deal -- it's not like achievements _do anything_.

 

-Errors:

There were a handful of times where blasts and enemies hands would pop through a wall or cover. I can only think of 2 or three instances of this happening, and in all but one of them I was able to quickly recover from the problem without dying. In all cases the game never lost its mind and had a hard lockup or freeze.

 

That's it! Comments?

 

Hex.

[ Should try to do DAH: Path of the Furon too in the near future... ]

[HammR25]

Think I'll get it since Newegg has it for $10 right now.

[moycon]

Think I'll get it since Newegg has it for $10 right now.

 

Awesome deal! I snagged it and 3 other games (Bionic Commando, F.E.A.R. files and Kingdom Under Fire) for $35.99!!

[hex65000]

Grump! I can't edit my post...

 

Additional notes:

 

-Multiplayer:

In short there is no multiplayer in Eat Lead. You get a 'gift' achievement at the end of the game that pokes fun at this topic. Obviously Xbox Live isn't too useful for this title.

 

-Difficulty:

I admit it. I played through this game on easy. When you clear the game once you can backtrack and play any level you want at any difficulty setting. So you can clear it on Easy, then go back and play the last level on medium and hard to 'clear the game' (I assume) at those levels too.

 

I bumped it to medium and was promptly owned by the game. I managed to slog my way to the final boss fight only to die repeatedly for about an hour and a half. Some of these fights lasted 2 minutes before my death. In short, I died a lot and it makes me sad. No, I didn't clear it either. It was 2am and my wife told me to go to bed. This getting stuck was really frustrating. In retrospect, I'll try and bring better guns next time to see if that helps.

 

Hex.

[ Was seriously annoyed by getting killed a bunch of times in such a short interval... the wenches with submachine guns chew you up fast. ]

[Crazy Climber]

I played Eat Lead and thought it was pretty good for the $20 (new) I spent on it. Some of the boss fights were annoying and sometimes I felt a little lost but for the most part it was a fun game

[bloodreptile]

Think I'll get it since Newegg has it for $10 right now.

 

Awesome deal! I snagged it and 3 other games (Bionic Commando, F.E.A.R. files and Kingdom Under Fire) for $35.99!!

I am going to get BC when I see it cheap so I would be interested to see what you think. Fear Files is awesome and so much better than fear 2. KUF...hmmm... cop op time... get out the monster you will need it...